CC* Compute-Campus: Louisville Academic Research Compute Cluster (LARCC)

This project establishes the Louisville Academic Research Compute Cluster (LARCC) at the University of Louisville (UofL). LARCC is a Graphics Processing Unit-enabled High-Throughput Computing infrastructure (HTC) that supports distributed parallelization of campus-wide computational tasks across both local and global computing resources. Connected to the OSG, LARCC can seamlessly scale across dozens of collaborating institutions, accelerating innovation in UofL’s priority areas, including Artificial Intelligence (AI), chemistry and molecular dynamics, health sciences and cell biology, bioinformatics, psychology and brain sciences, and materials science. LARCC overcomes the limitations of UofL’s existing cyberinfrastructure, facilitates cross-disciplinary research collaborations, and supports many outreach efforts including those to local K-12 students, African Americans, Hispanics, Native Americans, and Research Experiences for Undergraduates sites. LARCC’s HTC design optimizes large-scale computational tasks by enabling parallel execution across distributed computing resources, efficiently handling independent tasks including parameter sweeps and model optimizations. It advances research in energy-efficient data centers, high-throughput sequencing analysis to uncover underlying biological mechanisms, and the development of high-performance materials for nano-electronics and energy storage. In health sciences, LARCC supports the development of new machine learning models for cancer chemotherapy, digital pathology, and non-invasive cardiovascular diagnostics. It also facilitates new AI models in autonomous navigation and the development of digital therapeutics for conditions such as eating disorders, integrating 3D modeling and AI-driven diagnostics. By providing scalable and collaborative computational power, LARCC addresses UofL's campus-wide scientific computing needs, fosters new breakthroughs, and drives interdisciplinary innovation. This project is jointly funded by the Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure and the Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR). This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.